The award ceremony was hosted at the Free and Open Source Software
Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in collaboration with the Free Software
Foundation Europe.

A committee of Free Software pioneers and leaders selected the winner
and two other finalists from the scores of mostly volunteer
programmers worldwide who dedicate their time to advancing Free
Software. The selection committee included: Miguel de Icaza, Ian
Murdock, Eric Raymond, Peter Salus, Vernor Vinge, and Larry Wall.
Prior to committee deliberations, a two month open nominations
process decided the list from which the committee chose these
finalists.

Guido van Rossum was chosen from three finalists for the award. The
other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch, for his work on GNU
Ghostscript, the popular Postscript emulation program for GNU/Linux,
and Andrew Tridgell, for his work on Samba, a Microsoft Windows
network file system emulation program.

This was the fourth award of this kind. The prior winners were Larry
Wall, Miguel de Icaza, and Brian Paul.

About Free Software Foundation Europe:

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable
non-governmental organization dedicated to all aspects of Free
Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may
participate in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use,
copy, modify and redistribute software—as described in the Free
Software definition—allow equal participation in the information
age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software
politically and legally, and giving people freedom by supporting
development of Free Software are central issues of the FSF Europe,
which was founded in 2001 as the European sister organization of the
Free Software Foundation in the United States.

About Free Software Foundation:

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as
in freedom) software—particularly the GNU operating system and its
GNU/Linux variants—and free documentation for free software. The FSF
also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of
freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at
http://www.gnu.org, is an important source of information about
GNU/Linux. They are headquartered in Boston, MA, USA.

About GNU/Linux:

GNU/Linux is the integrated combination of the GNU operating system with
the kernel, Linux, written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. The various
versions of GNU/Linux have an estimated 20 million users.

Some people call the GNU/Linux system “Linux”, but this misnomer leads to
confusion (people cannot tell whether you mean the whole system or the
kernel, one part), and spreads an inaccurate picture of how, when and
where the system was developed. Making a consistent distinction between
GNU/Linux, the whole operating system, and Linux, the kernel, is the best
way to clear up the confusion. See
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more
explanation.